The German Netflix series Dark, which I’ve now watched through, and loved all three seasons of, returns to a parable several times:

A human lives three lives. The first ends with the loss of naiveté, the second with the loss of innocence, and the third with the loss of life itself. It is inevitable that we will go through all three stages.

I have now spent more of my life on Prince Edward Island than off, a milestone I reached mid-March when the clock ticked over 27 years. Because Catherine and I moved here only 18 months after meeting, “life on Prince Edward Island” overlaps to a great degree with “life with Catherine”: PEI is the stage upon which our lives together played out.

So my life now neatly divides into three (I’m choosing to be optimistic about having another 27 years in me):

It doesn’t take much to shoehorn this into the Dark construction, as moving to PEI did coincide with a certain loss of naiveté, and the death of my father and of Catherine involved a rather dramatic loss of innocence. 

June and July were therapeutic months for me: I did a round of one-on-one therapy with my psychologist, and, in parallel, attended an 8 week men’s grief group (which I dubbed “grief club” to my fellow bereaved).

The life lesson from both, boiled down to their essence, is “feel all the feelings.” Easier said than done, especially when you try to do it all by yourself, which is how I’d been attacking the problem from January to June. Indeed, when the instigator of grief club phoned me one Friday in late spring to invite me to join, my first reaction was “thanks, but I’m okay.”

On Monday I changed my mind, phoned back, and signed up. I booked my first appointment with my psychologist on the same day.

Truth be told, the most important part of both experiences happened that day: the simple act of saying, to myself, “no, I don’t got this” was the most important step of all.

Catherine died 200 days ago; I’ve spent much of that time dwelling on the years we spent together, on her illness and death, and trying to figure out the practicalities of how to live now, as a single father and a single man.

I’ve also spent a lot of that time running away from feeling (I uttered the phrase “I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel this” more than once during therapy), and trying desperately to attach some sort of blueprint to what happens next.

That lack of a blueprint is daunting: I’m so, so used to having a blueprint, most recently the sad and inevitable blueprint of Catherine’s illness and death, that not having one left me grasping every which way for one. It was my brother Mike who pulled me out of its whirligig, telling me, when I proclaimed frustration at not knowing what the coming months and years would hold, that it’s okay to not know, that, for that matter, it’s not possible to know. That was good to be reminded of.

So “now until death” lays out before me. The purple era. Twenty-seven years of?

I vacillate between seeing it as a free and open road and a frightening forest path, but I’m spending more time in the former these days. There is a power in the loss of naiveté and innocence, something I didn’t anticipate: I have been to the top of the mountain; it is dreadful and sad and terrifying, but it’s also beautiful and full of promise to look out from that vantage point, and empowering to have made that climb and survive.

A friend of mine, consoling me after the death of my father, said that he had never felt so intensely alive after the death of his; I know exactly what he was talking about.

What’s next?

It all started with a letter in the Eastern Graphic.

I subscribe to the Graphic again, after a year break: I love the new extended tab format, and I am happy that my friend Allan Rankin is back in its pages.

The letter in question, from Jean Selines, concerned St. Margaret’s Beach and damages done to its dunes by a recently-arrived cottager. Jean’s letter began

For as long as anyone in the St. Margaret’s area can remember locals, summer residents and annual visitors have been enjoying the beautiful and pristine St. Margaret’s Beach. This beach is located on the north side just past the St. Margaret’s Pioneer Cemetery.

My 93-year-old Dad has been coming here since he could ride his bike to it in the 1930s. I and my siblings and cousins have been spending time here since the 1950s. More recently our children and grandchildren have played in the river that runs across the sand, learned to swim in the surf and built sandcastles on the shore. It is the spot to reconnect with relatives and friends on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy a picnic lunch while catching up on the local news.

Jean’s description of the beach was compelling enough that I decided that we needed to go and see it for ourselves. And so we powered up the EV and headed east.

We made good time to Souris, heading out the 48 Road to Cardigan, and then northeast through Bridgetown and Dundas to Dingwells Mills and then east through Fortune Bridge and Rollo Bay.

Our first stop was The Poké Shack, where we’d been almost exactly a month earlier; we picked up two poké bowls to go, and put them on ice in the cooler in the car (because I’ve now become that kind of organized person who carries a cooler in the car for summer road trips).

We charged up the car at the Irving, and then continues east until we could continue east no more (did you know that East Point is closer to France than it is to Fredericton?), stopping to eat our supper at East Point Lighthouse:

Our first choice for a supper spot was a couple of red Adirondack chairs set up on a platform overlooking the ocean:

We unpacked our food, only to realize that we had entertained the attention of a curious fox, a fox that crept ever-more-gradually our way:

The fox came close enough that we decided it was better to relocate than to try to shoo it away every minute or two, so we decamped to a picnic table nearer the lighthouse.

It seemed we’d lost the attention of the fox. Until we hadn’t, and it crept ever-closer (it’s actually a little farther away at this point than the photo makes it appear):

At this point we decided to retire to the car to finish our meal; as we walked away, the fox leapt up on the vacated picnic table to smell around for leftovers.

We finished our stop at East Point with a visit to Cherry On Top Creamery in the lighthouse cottage and then continued along to the north side to find St. Margaret’s Beach.

St. Margaret’s Beach turned out to be everything Jean Selines promised it would be.

We arrived about 7:00 p.m. and found that we had the entire beach to ourselves:

The river that Jean wrote about–Bear River–does, indeed, run through the sand to the ocean, giving us an opportunity to do some freshwater swimming just steps away from the saltwater ocean: 

The water was the perfect temperature, and the river a perfect depth for sitting in and contemplating the view.

After about an hour of paddling about and then changing out of our wet swimsuits, the sun was starting to come down, and the 8:30 p.m. Friday Night Family Zoom was imminent, so I snapped a photo of the sunset:

And another of a fisher about to set up at the mouth of the river:

And we were off back to Souris.

The road back to Souris took us right by one of the least-traveled roads on the Island, the lovely-named Mickle Macum Road, and through the community of Bear River, the name of which has, as you might expect, an interesting backstory:

Captain Roderick MacDonald, grand uncle of Marjorie MacDonald, killed a bear at Norris Pond, which is east of Souris. He was walking out of the woods and wearing his greatcoat. Suddenly, he was attacked by a huge bear, and, having an axe in his hand, threw it at the bear. Unfortunately, the axe flew off the handle, and missed the bear. The bear managed to knock him to the ground, and started to maul him, but his heavy coat protected him from the bear’s claws. He quickly shoved his hand and arm down the bear’s throat as far as possible, and pulled with all his might. After a long struggle, the bear let go and rolled over.

Captain Roderick scrambled to his feet and fled as fast as he could expecting that the bear would be at his heels any minute. However, he managed to reach home safely, thankful that he had worn his greatcoat which defended him against the bear.

The next day, he was relating the story to some friends who were sceptical of the event. So, he decided to take them into the woods where the event occurred. There lay the big black bear, just where he had toppled over. The mighty captain had killed the great beast by dislodging some of its vital organs.

Captain Roderick was considered a hero by all who knew him.

There are bears no longer on Prince Edward Island, so the way to Souris was clear.

We set ourselves up for Family Zoom, using a strong LTE connection on my iPhone, from the parking lot at the beach, and enjoyed spending time with family from Ontario, sharing stories in the spirit of Catherine’s father, who turned 89 years old this weekend.

By the time our call was done, the sun had set completely and the almost-full-Moon had come out over the harbour:

We walked down to the water for a bit, and then, mindful of the late hour and the long drive ahead, piled back into the car, popped up to the Irving to top up the battery, and drove through the cool summer night, Taylor Swift blaring from the hifi, arriving home just before 11:00 p.m.

Thank you to Jean Selines for the inspiration.

(Our route, over OpenStreetMap, map tiles from Stamen Design)

What’s most remarkable about the extended Wainwright-McGarrigle musical family is not so much the talent that lives in each of them as individuals, but how well it works in harmony when they sing together: witness their rendition of Hard Times Come Again No More: can you imagine a better mixture of voices?

(See also the Stephen Fearing coalition singing the same song).

I watch a lot of YouTube: the “Screen Time” setting on my iPhone tells me 90 minutes this week, and that’s only on my phone; I watch as much or more YouTube on Apple TV.

This means that I “Skip Ad” hundreds of times a month, and get annoyed by a lot of advertising that is mis-directed at me. Ads for Ford F-150 trucks and for the Christian Heritage Party abound.

I’ve experimented with turning off what Google calls “ad personalization,” but that makes things ever worse, as, whether by design or happenstance, the torrent of ads I see then are loud, annoying and offensive.

In attempt to stanch the worst and most annoying, I set out to edit my “How your ads are personalised” settings for Google (and thus YouTube). 

Before starting, here’s how Google has me pegged:

• 45–54 years old
• Accounting & Financial Software
• Action & Adventure Films
• Apparel
• Autos & Vehicles
• Books & Literature
• Camera & Photo Equipment
• Canada
• Career Resources & Planning
• Coffee & Tea
• Collaboration & Conferencing Software
• Combat Sports
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Football
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Greetings Cards
• Hockey
• Home Appliances
• Home Automation
• Home Furnishings
• Home Improvement
• Household Income: Upper Middle
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Kia
• Kitchen & Dining
• Lexus
• Local News
• Luxury Vehicles
• Mazda
• Microwaves
• Mobile Phones
• Motorcycles
• Movies
• Music & Audio
• Music Streams & Downloads
• Network Monitoring & Management
• Networking
• Nintendo
• Office Supplies
• Online Video
• Performing Arts
• Pets
• Photographic & Digital Arts
• Product Reviews & Price Comparisons
• Refrigerators & Freezers
• Restaurants
• Rock Music
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Films
• Shopping Portals
• Skiing & Snowboarding
• Sports
• Travel & Transportation
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• TV Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows
• Urban Public Transport
• Women’s Interests

After (using Google’s obviously-purposefully-hard-to-use) altering my settings, I ended up with:

• 45–54 years old
• Books & Literature
• Canada
• Coffee & Tea
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Office Supplies
• Performing Arts
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• Urban Public Transport

Let’s see if this works.

I started a new sketchbook on May 26, 2020, on the 3rd day of the “pandemic reopening” at The Bookmark; it’s a paper-oh Circulo Orange on Grey A6, an old favourite.

I try to carry the sketchbook with me everywhere I go–you can’t sketch sketches without a sketchbook–and to fill the time I would otherwise spend mindless on my phone with making a sketch of whatever is handy while I’m eating lunch, or waiting for someone, or just taking a break.

Province House Hoarding

July 10, 2020. This is a corner of the hoarding around the Province House restoration site, colourfully emblazoned with Parks Canada messaging. The tiny window on the right is where you can see Eckhart.

Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row

July 13, 2020. While sitting on the patio drinking coffee at Receiver on a still-cool summer morning. A helpful reminder of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter both.

From Victoria Provincial Park

July 19, 2020. Oliver and I got takeout lunch at Casa Mia by the Sea and took it to Victoria Provincial Park to eat; I made this sketch of the Westmoreland River and the hills beyond sitting in back of our car in the shade of its hatchback.

Phở Queen

July 20, 2020. Another sketch from the patio of Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, this time facing the opposite direction, looking at The Guild (right) and Phở Queen, the new Vietnamese restaurant next door to it.

Victoria Row Flower Box

July 29, 2020. Another Receiver patio sketch: the flower box at the downstairs entrance to Happy Glass.

Rob MacDonald at Work

July 29, 2020. Rob MacDonald and I often share Receiver Coffee in the morning, and Rob, who’s “at the office” when he’s there, is almost always wearing headphones. Yesterday I was sitting right behind him, and couldn’t pass up the chance to capture the moment.

Cherry Valley School

July 30, 2020. Several years ago the daughter of a good friend landed on PEI with a group of friends intending to stay at a cottage in Earnscliffe. Their ambitious plan to cycle there from town was aborted when they realized how far it was, and so I volunteered to drive them out, catching a glimpse of the old Cherry Valley School on my way. I returned there this morning to make this sketch. It’s a lovely building.

Christ Church Cherry Valley

July 30, 2020. Christ Church Cherry Valley is a church in the least likely of places, down a one-lane road where only a tiny sign at the highway telegraphs its location. I set myself under a tree and made this sketch this morning.

Point Prim Lighthouse

July 30, 2020. The Point Prim Chowderhouse was my ultimate destination this morning; after placing an online order and having 20 minutes before picking it up, I drove down the lane to the parking lot by the lighthouse and made this sketch.

While I’ve been in the habit of simply taking photos of my sketches before posting them online, this time I used a Konica Bizhub C554e photocopier to scan them as 400 dpi JPEGs, full-colour. It’s a less forgiving method, but I like the results.

I used to push my sketches to a Google Photos shared album, back when I was an Android user, but I’ve since gone all-in on Apple’s ecosystem, and there’s no obvious analogue. Which is probably good, as The Dark Ages of Share on OVI taught me. So I’ll post them here from time to time.

Four of Canada’s preeminent folk musicians—Stephen Fearing, Connie Kaldor, James Keelaghan and Shari Ulrich—sing Hard Times Come Again No More in support of Unison Benevolent Fund.

Brilliant.

The similarity between Puritan signage and COVID signage has never been as obvious as at Canadian Tire.

Penn Jillette on Donald Trump, last August, on the The Joe Rogan Experience:

More than most things I’ve read and watched about Donald Trump, I found Pillette’s insights useful.

Speaking about Trump’s qualities that recommended him as a host of The Apprentice, where Jillette was twice a contestant:

You want someone capricious, and crazy, with no filter. That’s what you want.

And that’s what we got.

And so he makes arbitrary decisions… you know, the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment. 

Donald Trump got elected President because there was enough of an audience who wanted to see what would happen in his next episode. I have a close colleague, a now-deeply-remorseful Trump voter, who admitted as much to me about his own reasons.

Jillette continued:

Donald Trump Jr. said to me “of all the people we’ve had on the show, you seem like the only person who’s ever liked my father.”

He said “you actually seem to like him.”

I said, you know, I have a fascination and a respect and a, um, affection, for people who are able to get out of their filters.

And I said some people do that with pure genius, like Bob Dylan, some people do it with bravery, like Lenny Bruce, some people do it with drugs, Neil Young, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix, perhaps, and most people do it with a mixture of stuff.

But I said, Thelonius Monk said “genius is the one who is most like himself.”

And I said, with some sort of mental problems, coupled with, um, greed, and a lack of compassion, your father has somehow found a way to throw off the filters. 

I’ve long maintained that “entrepreneurship” is, at its core, a learning disability: it’s not the presence of some elusive business genius, it is simply common sense coupled with an inability to care what other people think. Trump is the prime example of that. As Jillette rightly points out, this learning disability is similarly useful for creating great art, theatre and music.

Unfortunately for the world, this learning disability does not equip one to be an effective President of the United States.

Per the kind-of-quinquennial schedule (2001, 2006, 2015), Oliver and I were due for a trip up west, and a kind invitation from our friend Thelma gave us a conceit.

We left Charlottetown late morning with the Kia Soul EV fully charged; it was threatening rain, but pleasantly cool at 22ºC, and we made good time. 

Our first stop was Viva La Crepe, relocated this season from Summerside to Miscouche for our convenience. I had the taco bowl, Oliver the chicken crepe; both were tasty and exactly what we needed.

We continued west to Route 12, and then northeast to Foxley River where we spent a very pleasant afternoon with Thelma, fortified by strong coffee, excellent chocolate chip cookies (made by her mother), and joined later by Thelma’s partner Steven.

One of the bonus visitor experience features Thelma offers is access to her level 2 EV charger, which we eagerly availed ourselves of, having only 36 km of range left on the Soul when we arrived. Alas it was not to be, as I foolishly forgot that I’d set the car to start charging at 4:00 a.m. every morning, whether at home or in Foxley River. So we left with the charge we brung.

Fortunately the new fast charger in O’Leary was handy-by, and we arrived there with 18 km of range, so there were no worries but for needing to park the car behind the charger to get access to it. We charged for 19 minutes and that got us up to 80%, in theory just enough to get ourselves back home without charging again.

Although the hour was getting late, I realized we were just down the road from our friend John Cousins, and that it would be unlikely we’d be back up west for some time; unable to find John’s phone number, we took a chance and popped in; John warmly welcomed us with his pandemic tales and a tour of the log building he and his grandson are renovating.

Back on the road as night fell, the air was a pleasant 18ºC and the going east was easy. To stanch the smallest itch of range anxiety, we pulled into Summerside for a quick 9 minute EV top-up back to 80% at Canadian Tire. The rest of the drive home was cool and just-on-the-edge-of-too-foggy.

A good day.

Jessica Spengler, writing in her plague journal:

I’m just idling right now. I have killed the headlights and put it in neutral. I’m not looking ahead, not speculating, trying not to worry, trying not to get frustrated. I am making do, making the best of the situation, and making merry when I can. And I am not making plans.

That paragraph happens to come very close to describing what it was like supporting Catherine through 5 years of living with incurable cancer.

Which might explain why, relatively speaking, pandemic life, while not a walk in the park, hasn’t slayed me: I’ve developed mad skills in a realm of coping that’s conveniently become globally relevant.